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Syria Is Not Iraq

IN the search for an American response to the civil war in Syria, the favorite guidebook seems to be our ill-fated adventure in Iraq. We have another brutal Middle East autocrat holding power on behalf of a sectarian minority. We have another dubious cast of opposition factions competing for foreign patronage. We hear some of the same hawks — John McCain, Paul Wolfowitz — exhorting us to intervene, countered by familiar warnings of “quagmire.” We even have murky intelligence claims that the regime has used weapons of mass destruction.

This time, though, we have a president who, having opposed the costly blunder of Iraq and been vindicated, is holding back. The theme song at the National Security Council is “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

As a rule, I admire President Obama’s cool calculation in foreign policy; it is certainly an improvement over the activist hubris of his predecessor. And frankly I’ve shared his hesitation about Syria, in part because, during an earlier column-writing interlude at the outset of the Iraq invasion, I found myself a reluctant hawk. That turned out to be a humbling error of judgment, and it left me gun-shy.

Of course, there are important lessons to be drawn from our sad experience in Iraq: Be clear about America’s national interest. Be skeptical of the intelligence. Be careful whom you trust. Consider the limits of military power. Never go into a crisis, especially one in the Middle East, expecting a cakewalk.

The United States has supplied humanitarian aid and diplomatic pressure. But our reluctance to arm the rebels or defend the civilians being slaughtered in their homes has convinced the Assad regime (and the world) that we are not serious. Our fear that arms supplied to the rebels would fall into the hands of jihadis has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because instead of dealing directly with the rebels we left the arming to fundamentalist monarchies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and they are predictably using lethal aid to appease the more radical Islamists.

It might have been easier to intervene a year ago, before the opposition was so fragmented. But back then the president was busy ending foreign engagements and in no mood to start a new one. Besides, everyone was preoccupied by the dramas of Iran’s nuclear program, Egypt’s revolution and Ohio’s electoral votes. Since then, Assad has been sly about escalating his savagery by degrees — artillery, then aerial bombardment, then Scud missiles and now, apparently, chemical weapons — while staying just below whatever threshold of horror might shame us into responding.

What you hear from the Obama team is that we know way too little about the internal dynamics of Syria, so we can’t predict how an intervention will play out, except that there is no happy ending; that while the deaths of 70,000 Syrians are tragic, that’s what happens in a civil war; that no one in the opposition can be trusted; and, most important, that we have no vital national interest there. Obama conceded that the use of poison gas would raise the stakes, because we cannot let the world think we tolerate spraying civilians with nerve gas. But even there, the president says he would feel obliged to respond to “systematic” use of chemical weapons, as if something less — incremental use? sporadic use? — would be O.K. This sounds like a president looking for excuses to stand pat.

In contemplating Syria, it is useful to consider the ways it is not Iraq.

First, we have a genuine, imperiled national interest, not just a fabricated one. A failed Syria creates another haven for terrorists, a danger to neighbors who are all American allies, and the threat of metastasizing Sunni-Shiite sectarian war across a volatile and vital region. “We cannot tolerate a Somalia next door to Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey,” said Vali Nasr, who since leaving the Obama foreign-policy team in 2011 has become one of its most incisive critics. Nor, he adds, can we afford to let the Iranians, the North Koreans and the Chinese conclude from our attitude that we are turning inward, becoming, as the title of Nasr’s new book puts it, “The Dispensable Nation.”

Second, in Iraq our invasion unleashed a sectarian war. In Syria, it is already well under way.

Third, we have options that do not include putting American troops on the ground, a step nobody favors. None of the options are risk-free. Arming some subset of the rebels does not necessarily buy us influence. The much-touted no-fly zone would put American pilots in range of Syrian air defenses. Sending missiles to destroy Assad’s air force and Scud emplacements, which would provide some protection for civilians and operating room for the rebels, carries a danger of mission creep. But, as Joseph Holliday, a Syria analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, points out, what gets lost in these calculations is the potentially dire cost of doing nothing. That includes the danger that if we stay away now, we will get drawn in later (and bigger), when, for example, a desperate Assad drops Sarin on a Damascus suburb, or when Jordan collapses under the weight of Syrian refugees.

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Fourth, in Iraq we had to cajole and bamboozle the world into joining our cause. This time we have allies waiting for us to step up and lead. Israel, out of its own interest, seems to have given up waiting.

Advocates of doing more (a group that included Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus before they left the administration) do not agree on every detail of what “more” means, but it might look something like this:

For starters, President Obama articulates — as he has not done — how the disintegration of Syria represents a serious danger to America’s interests and ideals. The United States moves to assert control of the arming and training of rebels — funneling weapons through the rebel Supreme Military Council, cultivating insurgents who commit to negotiating an orderly transition to a nonsectarian Syria. We make clear to President Assad that if he does not cease his campaign of terror and enter negotiations on a new order, he will pay a heavy price. When he refuses, we send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace.

All of this must be carefully choreographed and accompanied by a symphony of diplomacy to keep our allies with us and our adversaries at bay. The aim would be to eventually have a transition government, stabilized for a while by an international peacekeeping force drawn mostly from neighboring states like Turkey.

I don’t mean to make this sound easy. It might well be that the internal grievances are too deep and bitter to forestall a bloody period of reprisals. But that outcome is virtually inevitable if we stay out.

The administration is now preparing contingency plans along those lines in the event that Assad’s use of chemical weapons forces our hand. Why wait for the next atrocity?

“We have to change the calculation of the people around Assad, to have them figure out a deal is better than going down to the end,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Princeton professor and former director of policy planning for Hillary Clinton’s State Department, who was an early advocate of intervention. “And the sooner we change that calculation, the more possibility there is for a political settlement.”

“The challenge to this administration from 2009 has been how to move this country past the Iraq war into a sensible, viable foreign policy,” added Vali Nasr. “That hasn’t happened. We’re paralyzed like a deer in the headlights, and everybody keeps relitigating the Iraq war.”

Whatever we decide, getting Syria right starts with getting over Iraq.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 6, 2013, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Syria Is Not Iraq. Today's Paper|Subscribe